Using Serendipity

Every few days I go through my site logs to see where my visitors are coming from. Its a big task, since this site is now getting over anywhere from 100 to 200 new visitors per day, in addition to all the regular visitors. When I go through my logs I often come across other blog sites where one of my Serendipity templates has been tweaked or customised.

Take a look at Diana's blog Pocahontasia [Sadly Diana's site is no longer operational] to see an example of some excellent work modifying the andreas08 template for her needs. The colors have been changed from the original blue to red, and the header has been significantly expanded to make room for a rotating image. Also, a new background image has been added to the main content so that a red gradient sits behind the sidebar. I love this design and obviously a lot of thought has gone into making this design work for Diana.

The next site, Brannekes Online, uses the artisitic template and whilst most of the original work has been left alone, the simple act of changing the header graphic seems to make the design look totally different. Also this is a multi-author site which you don't see very often.

Almost every business these days has a website, but the maintenance and upkeep of a custom designed website can be very expensive, unfortunately this means that many business owners either pay for their first website and then let it languish, or they get help from friends or schoolkids who don't really understand their product and just use the experience to show off.

Sadly the website becomes an embarassment containing out of date information or branding that doesn't suit their image. And worse yet, when new information should be put onto the website, it isn't. There is a solution, use a blog engine, and by using Serendipity, I'm going to explain how any regular small business can quickly build a website, then maintain it, and all for the princely sum of $0, sorry, apart from your monthly hosting costs. Read More

Another user of Serendipity, Jay Bertrandt, has created an autosave plugin for Serendipity for those of us who type very long posts. Actually anyone could use his plugin and is designed for those times when you lose track of time, don't realise your session is about to expire or something terrible happens and your browser crashes. Using Jay's autosave plugin you can be sure that at least some of what you've written will be saved. Jay has also added a configurable timer so you can set the number of minutes between saves. Give it a go, and be sure to let Jay know your thoughts.

Well this is exciting, really really exciting. Matt Brett has released a full set of feed icons including source files for bloggers and theme designers to use.

Forget all those ugly xml or rss icons we used in the past, get the real deal, then read about MS adopting them as well. Did I say it before, this is exciting.